I don't think that's the assumption. Rather, the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring. And this makes intuitive sense to most people: a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.)
This doesn't justify massive wealth confiscation as much as it explains why it's an extremely reasonable reaction to the wealth amassing behavior we're expected to explain away as "normal."
They dont realize it most ofbthem, but they really have 0 prospect, 0 hope. Some go on reddit thinikg other people will sympathize on rant subreddits like r antiwork.. but at the end of the day they have 0 power and 0 prospect of having some in the future if thet stay in ze country.
Just move. For your own sake
Yes I’m sure these independent “experts” like yourself have a much better grasp at “fairness” and we should all believe that 100bn is too much.
Could you just scientifically deduce for me where the limit is? If I have 100m is that ok? In your expert opinion? Or is that too much? Should we cap at 1m? I’d love to see your maths on what constitutes a fair amount of wealth.
The intellectual arrogance of your comment is staggering. And unfortunately it’s a common opinion.
If others are capable to create a trillion dollars of value, I want them to be enjoy a significant share of that.
Millions of people who make a living with AdSense, preventing them from becoming homeless.
Millions more who make a living consulting on SEO, optimizing ad campaigns who aren't homeless.
Millions more whose businesses were helped to succeed by Google search and ads, preventing them and their employees from becoming homeless.
I think we should take at least $99 billion of his $100 billion and do something decent with it to offset the fact that we have to deal with him.
Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing.
Not ours[1]!
Edit: At least, not yet. I, for one, welcome the application of this logic to our current scheme.
The government spent $6.8 trillion last year. Do think at some time in November they were like "Damn, we were just about to end homelessness, but we came up $100 billion short. Oh well!"
Imagine if you had an employee who wasn't doing their job. Is the solution to give them a raise?
Edit: it's also worth nothing that this reasoning is perfectly symmetrical. Why in the world should I continue to allow a billionaire to profiteer, at the cost of immense civic damage?
1. Because creating a valuable company that provides a useful service is not profiteering.
2. Because creating a company did not cause civic damage in the first place.
3. Therefore confiscating the value of that company and transferring it to the government could not reverse any civic damage.
4. Destroying the engine of wealth creation in our society would cause immensely more civic damage.
This is also symmetrical in that once you realize this will not solve any problems - and that it will in fact create many more problems, you can then conclude it is not a civically appropriate thing to do. Even if it gives a sense of satisfaction to envious people "intuitively reason" that knocking people down a peg is "civically appropriate".
I'm really just interested in taxing them a bit more, because I don't think it's healthy for democratic, pluralistic societies to have such large wealth gaps. There are enough things to dislike about each other without bringing in immense, unspendable amounts of money.
We could instead work on ways to make poor people richer, which would actually make their lives better instead of making someone else life worse, and would also reduce the wealth gap. Somehow none of the “tax the rich” crowd seem interested in that.
Sociologically speaking, we have decent evidence that eliminating privation can break generational cycles of poverty. Our own (broadly successful!) attempt at it is still within living memory, as is its dismantling[1].
You're also pinballing between "the government needs more money to give to poor people" and "we should just take rich people's money because it makes poor people feel bad that some people are rich and it will make them feel better if the rich aren't so rich". Does the government actually need the money or not?
People might be temporarily helped by handouts, but they won't rise out of poverty until there's work available for them to support themselves. That is hampered by discouraging investment in productive enterprise via excessive taxes.
How much more exactly? How do you know when to stop raising taxes? You think current wealth gap is unacceptable, well what kind of gap is acceptable?
The higher your taxes are, the lower is the incentive for innovation and investment. What makes you think that "a bit more" is going to be a net positive? Higher taxes have tendency to slow down the economy. Should US be growing slower than China, for instance?
While taxes do help transfer wealth from rich to poor, they do it through government, which is incredibly inefficient (and, in many countries, corrupt).
> I don't think it's healthy for democratic, pluralistic societies to have such large wealth gaps
There were some big movements that shared similar ideas. Somehow they all have a tendency to cause millions of deaths due to famine and repressions. I'd rather have my wealth gaps.
There are interesting discussions to be had around inequality, but I don't think simple solutions like "just raise taxes until inequality goes away" or "take away their wealth and give it to the poor" (like another commenter suggested) are productive.
No one's hands are clean, rich or poor, to be sure, but the assumption is unwarranted and aggressive in its broadness. One does not assume particular guilt based on broad assumptions. Besides, these aren't liquid assets. Do people think these guys have a $100 billion dollars just laying around in a Scrooge McDuck-style Money Bin? That's not how net worth works.
> a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich
Allow?
> (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.)
This is unrelated. It construes wealth as a zero sum game. There is no such tension between wealth and poverty unless some kind of injustice was involved in robbing the poor.
And yes, "allow" is correct. Healthy societies don't allow their members to throw knives at each other in public places, or blow cigarette smoke in premature babies' faces, or do any number of basically antisocial things. The intuitive belief is that amassing wealth to the degree of hundreds of billions of dollars is essentially antisocial in the same way that being Mr. Marlboro in the NICU is.